Volunteer Management: Mobilizing All the Resources of the Community

3rd Edition

The definitive "textbook" on volunteer management. This book will help you:

Structure your volunteer program, complete with sample forms and policies
Ensure that volunteers are motivated and capable of performing their work
Evaluate the success of your volunteer engagement efforts

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Description

The definitive “textbook” on volunteer management with a thorough examination of every facet of a successful volunteer program, from planning and organizing through measuring effectiveness. It includes:

418 pages overall of basic material on every aspect of managing volunteers.
Data and program examples from more than 15 countries
Special emphasis on making use of the Internet in recruitment and volunteer management
A new chapter on "Special Topics in Volunteer Management" covering involvement of pro-bono volunteers, dealing with less-effective volunteers, helping volunteers improve their employability, and ethical issues in managing volunteers
55 pages of samples forms and organizational policies related to volunteers
Sample forms and worksheets for daily work with volunteers

Volunteer Management is not a book about managing “a program”; instead it focuses on connecting volunteers with an organization and on those unique aspects of working effectively with staff who do not receive monetary compensation.

Volunteer Management is designed to provide the new and the experienced volunteer program manager with both basic knowledge and state-of-the-art information, based on the more than 50 years of experience the authors have acquired in their work with thousands of volunteer programs.

Sample the Book

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Building Your Support Network for Leading Volunteer Involvement

By Steve McCurley & Rick Lynch
From Volunteer Management: Mobilizing All the Resources of the Community, INTERPUB GROUP CORPORATION, 2011, ch. 17, p. 320

Get Connected

The smart Volunteer Program Manager also needs to build support from the wider community of volunteer-utilizing agencies, communicating with other Volunteer Program Managers and sharing information and resources.

Admiral Hyman Rickover expressed this need best: “All of us must become better informed. It is necessary for us to learn from others’ mistakes. You will not live long enough to make them all yourself.”

Volunteer Program Managers who are not involved with a local DOVIA (Directors of Volunteers in Agencies) or a member of a national volunteer organization, is choosing to ignore the wisdom of others, making their jobs and their lives a lot harder. To see how much you can gain by belonging to a professional association see the Association for Volunteer Managers in the UK, the most energetic group of Volunteer Program Managers on the planet.

Volunteer Program Managers also need to build better connections within their own organization. The primary “problem” in volunteer involvement right now does not lie in finding new volunteers, it lies in enabling those who are already involved to accomplish productive work.

In the past ten years volunteer jobs have shifted to within agencies, placing volunteers more in contact and working relationships with agency staff. In many agencies, the primary coordinator or supervisor of volunteers is not the Volunteer Program Manager, but the staff person with whom the volunteer works with on a day-to-day basis.
Most of these staff have little or no experience in working with volunteers.

This is a pretty silly situation. The primary worry of Volunteer Program Managers should at this point be “staff competence,” the ability of staff to handle the highly technical resources that volunteers represent. This need increases dramatically as we draw from volunteer professionals who expect to be treated in a professional manner. Smart Volunteer Program Managers need to spend a little less time with their volunteers and a lot more time and energy enabling staff to make creative use of those volunteers.